A
new generation of communicators are staking out the territory of
television's future.

BY
DAN LOGAN - Hyde Parker - Dec.- Jan. 1973

Chicago's
underground television scene has bloomed.

A couple of years ago, there was little indication that it would happen.
There was a smattering of activity, some ideas. The seeds were being sown.

Now that it has quietly come to full flower, an explanation may be
necessary. Like what is it, anyway?

Underground television (or, as it's also called, alternative video) is
anything but broadcast television as we know it. It's television of the
people ­lightweight, inexpensive and easy to use.

A technological breakthrough, the portable videotape camera, is the major
identifying feature of underground television. The Sony Porta-Pak, the
most popular portable camera, looks and functions much like a film camera.
It's lightweight (22 pounds), can be mounted on a backpack, and operates
on rechargeable batteries. Extremely sensitive to light, it can be used
any­where without lights. The camera and a portable playback unit sell
for $1500.

Perhaps the camera's most extra­ordinary aspect is the half-inch
video­tape it records images on. The tape costs $12 per half-hour and can
be reused fifty times. Compare that with the cost of film ($100 per
half-hour plus processing) or the standard two-inch tape broadcasters use
($100 per half­hour but reusable), and you under­stand why the portable
camera is fre­quently thought of as a revolutionary invention.

The
Porta-Pak gives its owner the ability to go outside a studio setting
cheaply and easily, shooting an unlimit­ed amount of videotape, taking
all the chances he feels necessary. The tapemaker can also work alone,
in contrast to broadcast television, where indivi­dual contributions are
submerged in a complex collaborative mix.

Another new technological advance­ment tapemakers employ is the video
synthesizer, the operator of which has a high degree of control over the
modification of images. Initially, these machines are likely to
significantly affect the art world - they provide the artist with an
unlimited kinetic visual palette. As they become more sophisticated, the
synthesizers should have much wider application.

Since Sony first marketed its Porta­Pak in 1968, there has been talk of
its revolutionary impact and "the cassette revolution." But
like the exaggerated rhetoric of political revolution in 1968, the talk
has de-escalated to a realistic level. The fight over standardization of
video cassette equipment, among other harsh realities, has moderated the
in­itial burst of excitement.

The revolution will be gradual, but no serious student of the media doubts
that one will occur as the possibilities of cable television are realized.
Cable's multi-channel and two-way capa­bilities will change the
broadcaster­broadcastee relationship drastically. In February of 1972,
the FCC insured the public's right to use cable channels by requiring
cable operators to guarantee free access to anyone.

I visited with seven Chicagoans who are experimenting with the new
tele­vision technologies and thinking about how to best use cable when it
comes to Chicago. They all agree that Chicago is three to five years
behind New York in the development of alternative video - but Chicago
hasn't had cable (New York does) as a stimulus. Whether the City Council
selects a cable franchise in the near future or not (the selection, much
less the drafting of the or­dinance, is not in sight), these tapemakers
are working hard to catch up. I'm betting they will.

Tom
Weinberg

Like Anda
Korsts, Tom Weinberg was a member of Top Value Television, the
group which produced the 1972 poli­tical convention tapes (the most
widely seen half-inch tapes ever made). He's now a member of the
"loosely-knit coalition" known as TVTV, composed of several
members of the original groups.

Based in San
Francisco, with

members across the country, TVTV is one of the few alternative groups
geared to production for broadcast on a large scale. A diverse group of
half­inch veterans, it has an ambitious plan to utilize its expertise.
Its members know what they're doing, and they in­tend to do it with the
largest audience possible.

They're video pragmatists who've gone beyond the philosophizing and
euphoria and cultiness surrounding early video projects. They like to say
they're "post-political," not interested in talking about a
revolution in tele­vision, just interested in making it happen. They
think the time is right to build up an economically viable base for
alternative video.

Their early successes - the

convention tapes,
a program about
Rolling
Stone Magazine (also
shown on Channel 11), and others are evidence that they know how to
produce pro­grams and sell them as well as any broadcast operation. Now
they've come up with a plan to implement their capabilities in competition
with the television Establishment.

The project is called "Prime Time," which name suggests its
scope. It's an attempt to develop programming models for alternative video
which can compete with broadcast television. "Over the last four
years," reads the promotional brochure, "we've been
experimenting with videotape. During that time we have developed a harsh
critique of conventional TV. As a result, people often ask us: 'How would
you do it better?' " TVTV's tentative answer is "pretending that
television could be reborn."

"Our
plan," the brochure continues, "is to produce a
four-to-six hour package of programming which integrates the best
techniques of alternative television people and technology into a new
grammar of TV formats.

"We .,. anticipate that it can be
transmitted simultaneously on select outlets across the U.S. as a kind of
'network for a night.' "

". . . The project will serve both as a
context for showcasing the work of alternative video producers, and as a
prototype operating structure through which alternate programs could be
financed and distributed."

The subject matter of "Prime Time"
will be the future of electronic communication. It will attempt to prove
that style makes a difference, that halfinch style is the television style
of the future. TVTV will not limit itself to halfinch equipment - they're
not purists. The important thing is that alternative, forward-looking
style be presented effectively.

According to TVTV's plan, "Prime
Time" will evolve in three stages. The

first is
a survey of hardware and software in America and Europe, as well as a
survey of how television columnists and broadcasters think television
should be changed, to be published in book form next spring. Stage Two
will draw on major tapemakers' work for a ninety-minute prototype program.
Stage Three, built on the foundations of the previous stages, will be the
production and distribution of "Prime Time."

Both aspects of Weinberg's pre-
TVTV background, his business school training and his one-year career as a
producer at Channel 26, are unique in the Chicago alternative video world,
and both are assets for "Prime Time." Disenchanted with the
possibilities of broadcast television, even at a small and relatively
free-wheeling station like Channel 26, Weinberg gravitated toward
alternative tapemakers, then to TVTV. His attitude toward television is
the premise on which "Prime Time" is based: "It makes sense
to start from what you want to do, rather than starting with what
exists."

HYDE
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49

Tedwilliam
Theodore

Tedwilliam Theodore's
activities are too numerous to list here, but they're all community-based,
goal-oriented, social action projects. He does most of his work under the
aegis of his nonprofit corporation Communications for Change, a consulting
firm which helps organizations develop "economically and
programmatically viable" uses of videotape. Tedwilliam's goal is
helping people use tape by and for themselves. He's quick to point out
that he doesn't do alternative video to replace broadcast television - or
even use it. Call it closed-circuit TV, direct-application TV, or
small-application TV, his use of tape is always within a small group.

By his own definition, Tedwilliam does two
kinds of projects. Those which he describes as "social action"
include confrontation and resource

development. "Social welfare"
projects train social agencies to use tape for their purposes - in staff
training, counseling, community outreach, and inter-agency communication.

Tedwilliam's career as a videotape consultant
began with a lucky coincidence. In 1966, as a graduate student at the
University of Chicago, he took a part-time job in the Education Department
as a photographer. That was the year industrial format tape equipment was
first marketed. The University bought some, and he was the likely person
to experiment with it. He produced tapes for the Independent Learning
Project and the Master of Arts in Teaching Program.

In 1969, the Woodlawn Mental Health Center
hired Tedwilliam, still a

graduate student, to use
tape in preventive mental health and community outreach programs. He taped
meetings and played them back at other meetings. During two years there,
he felt he was "working blind" in the absence of conclusive data
from other experiments. But he was learning from his experience and
others', particularly the Canadian "Challenge for Change"
Program.

The need for new approaches to community
problems increased daily. Tedwilliam began free-lancing his skills to
mental health organizations, including the School Intervention and
Training Program (at the University of Chicago) and the Children's Center
for Learning Capacities.

Community Programs set up Communications for
Change in May of 1972, with Tedwilliam as director, to explore the use of
new tape techniques in Chicago communities. Its funding soon ran out, at
which point it became an independent firm working with many of the same
agencies.

Because his main objective is to help people
themselves with video, Tedwilliam teaches video often. He's given
workshops and demonstrations at Governors State University and the
Community Arts Foundation, and is now conducting Videotape Workshops at
Loop College.

You have to be versatile to support yourself
and your wife doing video- Tedwilliam is amazed that he's done it for the
last year. But he shouldn't be. He's on the ground floor of a movement
that can only grow larger with time.

Dan
Sandin

For Dan
Sandin, Assistant Professor of Art at Circle, the way to do
television is to build a machine called the Image Processor. It's a
"patch programmable general purpose analog computer, op­timized for
the real time processing of video images."

In less technical terms, the Image Processor is the visual equivalent of
the Moog Synthesizer. Dan feeds video images (or anything that can be
coded electronically) into it. Through mani­pulation of its controls, the
machine alters the image and displays it on a television screen. The
result can be videotaped.

The Image Processor is the most sophisticated machine of its type on the
planet. While more primitive visual synthesizers, the most famous being
the Paik/Abe Synthesizer, are capable of limited alteration of images (the
Paik/Abe combines and colorizes), the Image Processor can modify images in
virtually any way. Itcombines
images, colorizes them, processes them (changes their form) - it even
generates them from scratch. It's also the first and only visual
synthesizer to

be
modular in design, which means it can be easily adapted to any input.

Dan is a nuclear physicist. But, like many of Chicago's video freaks, his
avocation became his occupation. After receiving his M.A. in Nuclear
Physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1966, Dan designed light shows
for fun (and negative profit). Then he took a job as a researcher at
Wisconsin, but soon "it became clear to me that what I really wanted
to do was something visual, something that involved more of my being than
physics." He did some photographic exhibitions, some light sculpture,
then began looking for a college teaching position in Art. Circle hired
him.

With a $3,000 grant from the University for "innovations in under­graduate
curriculum," Dan built the Image Processor during the 1972-1973
academic year. By the end of January, he was able to inaugurate it with
"In Consecration of New Space," an im­provisational visual work
in collabora­tion with Jim Wiseman and Phil Morton of the Art Institute.
Since January, the trio has exhibited the I mage Processor

around the
country. In their first appearance on broadcast television, they taped a
segment for Channel 11's "Made in Chicago."

The I mage Processor represents a major shift in Dan's work from
"single purpose art objects" to "general pur­pose systems
embodying a large number of possible uses." The two fundamental uses
of the Image Pro­cessor are as a learning tool and as a vehicle for
communication.

It's the individual operator's learn­ing experience that most interests
Dan. He refers to the Image Processor as "a tool for personal
growth." Just as play­ing a musical instrument affects the life of a
musician, using the Image Processor affects the way the user sees the
world. Dan says the process of using any technology profoundly affects the
user.

As far as Dan's concerned, the production of art as well as potential
broadcast applications of the Image Processor are secondary and merely
coincidental to its effect on the in­dividual. That's why the machine is
always available to his students. He thinks extensions of the Image
Processor concept will be the teaching machines of the future. To replace
the "antiquated interrogation pro­cedures" of today's
computerized in­struction, man will develop "a very powerful machine
that you control to find out things about yourself and your
universe."

It will be more efficient than previous kinds of learning. The Image
Processor's capability of altering images in real time, without lapse
between conception and realization, is an im­portant one. Actually, there
is an in­finitesimal gap, a matter of micro­seconds. But compared to the
length of time between conception and finished film, or conception and
finished paint­ing, or conception and finished novel, the processing of
images in real time is a significant breakthrough. "You can go
through a set of experiences with the Image Processor in an
afternoon," says Dan, "that would take, using any other
technology, weeks or months."

The time of mass use of machines like the Image Processor for personal
growth is probably not far in the future. Despite his knowledge of nuclear
physics, Dan has no formal training in electronics. He was able to design
and construct the Image Processor because the technology of integrated
circuits has become so simple that virtually any­one can use it
creatively. The Image Processor is just one of many such machines under
construction. And it is so simple to operate that anyone can learn in a
few hours. Soon children may play with image processors and syn­thesizers
instead of Erector sets.

HYDE PARKER 51Anda Korsts

Former
radio newsperson Anda Korsts organized Videopolis, a "community video
access project," early this year. It's a non-profit, tax-exempt
corporation designed to make sure that Chicago appreciates the potential
and explores the possibilities of half-inch tape before cable arrives.

If Videopolis is any indication, Anda has a
great future in underground TV. As Ken Englund of the Illinois Arts
Council staff puts it "Nothing gets in her way!" Her ability and
aggressiveness has enable her to involve organizations as diverse as the
Arts Council, the North Lawndale Economic Development Corporation, and the
Latvian magazine Mazputnins in the project.

Chicago Board of Education, and Urban Gateways
of Chicago have utilized Anda and her two partners in Videopolis, Lilly
Ollinger and Jack McFadden, to train people in the use of video equipment
and to study the feasibility of using video as an adjunct to their
programs.

The group's more specific focus for this year
is experimentation with five uses of tape: education, community
organization, arts documentation, historical documentation, and archiving.

Because it's the first group in Chicago
organized to meet the need for various kinds of
experimentation, Videopolis has formed associations with some of the
city's most vital institutions: It is investigating tape's community
organization potential with the Citizens Action Program and documenting
the history of Hull House. With Studs Terkel, Videopolis is studying the
possibility of putting books like Division Street: America and Hard Times
on videotape.

And Videopolis has accomplished some firsts.
In the area of arts documentation, it has been developing a series of
programs about the "Chicago School" of artists, the first
significant effort to document these artists and their work. Videopolis
helps each artist to produce his own tape. The initial one-hour tape was
shot in Ed Paschke's home. Videopolis has also preserved some of the
Lincoln Avenue theater scene for posterity by taping the Organic Theater's
Warp and well as Turds in Hell, Muzeeka, and Saved at the Kingston Mines
Theater.

But these are only a few of Videopolis's
liaisons in the Chicago community. It's constantly working to accumulate
more, in Chicago and around the country. Last year Anda attended most of
the major gatherings on cable TV and alternative media. Videopolis
maintains extensive print and tape libraries, circulates a newsletter, and
sponsors regular tape showings.

The basic funding of Videopolis -- $23,000 for
one year -- comes from the Arts Council, the Wieboldt Foundation,
and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Although it would pay
for only one hour-long filmed documentary at Channel 11, the $23,000, plus
about $2,000 from organizations given access to Videopolis, will pay for
equipment, salaries, tape, and other expenses for one year. Videopolis is
a special program in Circle's College of Urban Studies (the University's
coordinator is veteran Chicago filmmaker Jerry Temaner), which status
entitles it to the use of sophisticated editing facilities and an
institutional framework for the distribution of videotapes.

tour years ago, Anda Korsts covered the City
Hall beat for WBBM Radio. She didn't like it, with one exception.
"The Convention in '68 was great. But I had my assignment. I realized
when I was done that I knew almost nothing about the Convention."

After leaving WBBM, she worked with
Michael Sham berg, author of Guerrilla Television (a guide to alternative
video) and a member of Raindance, a pioneering video cooperative in New
York City. Anda and Shamberg had once worked together as reporters at
Chicago's City News Bureau.

Last year Anda was a part of Top Value
Television, a group coordinated by Shamberg which utilized half-inch
equipment to cover both political conventions. Now known as TVTV, it
marketed three tapes of the conventions to several cable companies and
broadcast stations (including Channel 11 in Chicago). Anda appreciated the
ability to shoot a virtually unlimited amount of tape and the lack of
necessity to drag a union crew along with her as she shot. She feels she
knows something about the 1972 conventions. And she learned something
about the nature of the new medium in contrast to broadcast television or
radio: "Because it's inexpensive and mobile, you don't have to plan,
as opposed to the planning that's done in broadcast TV or film. You don't
have to decide on an interpretation before you cover an event. It's closer
to writing. With writing, you take notes about everything. You go back
afterwards and find the quotes or descriptions that are most suggestive.
Similarly, with half-inch tape, you can just keep on taping."

Anda's background is in painting. But she
loves the process of using tape, especially if its allowing her to be
relatively self-sufficient - she can use both camera and microphone at
once. She intends one day to do "very personal video art."

52 HYDE PARKER

Kaye Miller

Kaye Miller and Roberta Kass (at
right)

Kaye Miller, Instructor in Political Science at Circle, approaches
video more analytically than anyone else I've met. Perhaps that's because
his field concerns itself more with messages than with the media in which
they're presented.

In the mid-60's, Kaye experimented with film as a graduate student at
Berkeley. In 1968, at Circle, he and sociologist Gerry Swatez developed a
project that indulged their interests both in film and in research - a
film study of the '68 Democratic Convention. Proposing to "preserve
the concrete," they received funding and a considerable amount of
technical assistance from Circle. Taking two years to complete, the film
won prizes at the Venice and Chicago Film Festivals and the Edinburgh
Festival.

With their first film as a sales point, Kaye and Gerry began seeking
funding for new film research. None was available. But, having completed
construction on several buildings in 1970, the University did have funds
for equipping the buildings. While film stock was an "expendable
supply" and processing an expense, tape equipment and reusable tape could be coded
as equipment. That budgeting peculiarity turned them into tapemakers.

Showing their Convention film at meetings of various professional
associations, they had become intrigued by that kind of convention and
puzzled by its appeal. So they taped the 1971 Convention of the American
Political Science Association in Chicago. In the process of shooting 150
hours of tape for a one-hour product, they learned a great deal about
tape.

During the 1971-1972 academic year, Kaye began experimenting with the
"consciousness raising" potential of tape with five community
organizations (particularly the Young Patriots Health Clinic in Uptown).
He taught these organizations to look at the reality of their communities
with tape. At the end of the academic year, with this work incomplete, the
state budget was cut and his funding collapsed. In drafting the budget, no
contingency plans had been considered for projects in progress.

Kaye is now devising projects with his most recent tape collaborator,
Roberta Kass, a former political and union organizer. They want to
discover "how one can use a medium that represents surfaces to get at
the insides of things. We want to develop," says Kaye, "modes of
making film and tape that speak adequately for the world they represent.
The problem is to make them speak for both the surface and the
inside." Their most provocative idea, which is now just an idea, is a
project that will "get inside" the world of children. They're
searching for the best ways of using the language of tape. Their concern
for more effective use of the medium has led Kaye and Roberta to edit this
month's issue of Radical Software, a national magazine devoted to
alternative video technology. In it, they've initiated the arduous process
of developing a language of criticism appropriate to tape by reviewing
past issues of the magazine itself and tapes by major tapemakers.

The idea of a critical issue provoked strong negative reactions.
Several influential tapemakers refused to submit

their
efforts, saying that tapes aren't meant to be criticized or that criticism
is authoritarian.

But Kaye and Roberta believe criteria for evaluating tape are
necessary. As a tapemaker, Kaye says "you need to make and you need
to criticize. It's through the critical process that you begin to discover
the possibilities of the medium, its characteristics, and what can and
cannot be done."

Roberta supports this thesis in her introductory article, and sounds a
warning: "To keep silent about serious things will allow the
conventional and corrupt forces of public opinion, the state, and business
to swoop up the meanings and definitions. . . The new experiences we have
had are much too precious to subject to the twisted meanings of the old
culture which wildly attempts to absorb anything which even vaguely
threatens change."

Phil Morton
Phil Morton, Assistant Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute, has made a copy of Dan Sandin's Image Processor and prepared plans for duplication of Image Processors. Dan and Phil will make the plans available next year.

Like Dan, Phil teaches Video with an art orientation. Teaching design five years ago, he stumbled on a video system
Tucked in a closet in the Art Institute. He played with it for two months before persuading sixty students to sign a petition saying that they would take a video course. The School approved
his teaching two courses.

A one-faculty member Video Department at the School, Phil is still playing with video equipment. He considers his function to be assuring his students access to the equipment, promoting "play instead of program production."

He lets his students come to the medium as fresh as he did, without pre~ conceptions of how it should be used, as if it were their first pencil. Video, he tells them, can be "as much a personal and flexible medium as the telephone system." By not imposing restriction on what h is students can do or should do with it, he feels he's "allowing the structure of the medium to surface."

About the only aspect of Phil Morton's work which fits into the traditional academic mold is his institution of a Video Data Bank (tape library of "folk TV" from the Art institute and other sources at the school. All students can "access" the tapes at any time.

HYDE PARKER 53

Dave Affelder - Hum Video

One tape Kaye Miller likes is "Sit-In:

A Docufantasy" by Steve Landsman, a tape about the 1969 sit-in at the University of Chicago. Miller compares it to the films of Peter Watkins ("The War Game," "Privilege," "The Battle of Culloden" and "Punishment Park"), fiction films, based on fact, which
transcend fact (like Cocteau's "truth beyond truth").

"Sit-In" opens with a reconstruction of the event in still photographs, then shifts abruptly to fantasy by means of mock interviews (a device Watkins often uses). The 123 students actually expelled by the University are presented as 123 students murdered by police.
"Sit-In's" documentary appearance leads the viewer to trust the tape's veracity - he is never quite sure whether the slaughter is fact or fiction. The tape has generated controversy, but according to Miller, "the real
meaning of the sit-in's outcome was more fully realized in the fiction than in any straight representation . . . "

"Sit-In" is an improvised tape, made at the University of Chicago's Hum Video, probably the only place in the city where the spontaneous evolution of a tape over a long period is possible.

Organized by English Professor John Cawelti in October of 1972, Hum Video has no preconceived notions as to how it can best serve the needs of the University community. Like the Urban Journalism Program, it serves as an adjunct to existing curricula. Its
equipment is available to anyone for any purpose, it fosters free play.

Dave Affelder, the twenty-three year-old U. of C. graduate who coordinates Hum Video, is largely responsible for its relaxed atmosphere. Affelder has no preconceived notions about half-inch because, before Hum Video, all he knew about television was what he learned one summer at the U.S. Commerce Department, where he compiled a report on local origination for cable television.

As a senior Public Affairs major, Affelder heard that Cawelti was preparing the grant proposal for Hum Video and volunteered his knowledge of budgeting for local origination.
(Cawelti knew even less.) When the Benton Educational Research Fund for Humanities Education (the 'Hum' in Hum Video) funded the project, Cawelti asked Affelder to coordinate it. Since he "didn't have a real trade anyway," Affelder accepted.

With only Sony half-inch editing equipment at his disposal, Affelder's biggest headache has been editing quality. A year ago, each edit created picture instability lasting several seconds. But Affelder and some devoted volunteers have modified the equipment and their use of it to produce acceptable edits and
substantially reduce the time spent editing. They think a little money will alleviate the remaining difficulties.

Hum Video's forty or fifty "heavy accessers" have tried just about everything to which their broad man~ date entitles them. Students have recorded University events, video "papers," and lecturers. Affelder made a momento tape of a steamboat trip down the Mississippi. Others have used the equipment in the community or, like Landsman, for literary purposes.

At worst, Hum Video is a model for community access cable. At best, it is a likely place for breakthroughs in
half inch techniques, simply because its accessers aren't drilled in the use of conventional ones. They are going to come up with new solutions to problems, as they did in taping
"Sit In:" "We used Bosco," says Affelder, "instead of blood."

A late bulletin: Hum Video's funds for next year are going to be tied up in the estate of the late William Benton. Affelder plans to "tough out" the
funding crisis.

Tapemakers' reluctance to submit themselves to critical standards is understandable. Many are still struggling with editing quality, a much more elementary consideration. Those who've overcome that obstacle generally feel their work is
experimental.

But the critical process - in its most basic sense - is necessary and inevitable. The Museum of Modern Art is planning an exhibition of video works for next year which will bring
established critical standards to bear. The Public Broadcast Service plans to air a
program of alternative video works which may even open the eyes of local television critics to underground
television. Closer to home, the Illinois Arts Council is thinking about an
exhibition of Illinois tapemakers' work.

Where do Chicago tapemakers go from here? Wherever their instincts and sources of income lead them ~ that's the only definitive answer. The medium is too young, and the factors Impinging on it are too many and varied, to predict its future with any accuracy.

One can say only that the technology is constantly improving and that it will attract more and more followers. Next year Sony will market color Porta-Paks for a slightly higher price than the black-and-white ones. This will definitely increase the marketability of half-inch programming. And it will enable the average person to compete in making color television programs with broadcasters - for an investment of under $2,000.

Chicago alternative tapemakers will be ready to do just that.

54

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